Vapour

Oh my holy, why hurt my eyes.

got softlocked behind a broken checkpoint and gave up

the prototype had so much potential, but this game is too broken to even be near playable and nothing really tells you what you have to do or where you have to go. the whole level design expects you to attempt to go out of bounds to actually progress with the game.

In my opinion, the Vapor Prototype is really better, the truth is that I'm a little sorry that they left this project aside, it really could have given more, the game is not finished and also with quite serious errors, I'll keep the game I'm not going to refund it, this game deserved much more attention. But they tried despite failure.

I found Vapours world and mechanics to be pretty interesting, but as of writing this in 2023, 8 years after its release, nothing has ever been fixed.
It suffers from game breaking bugs, softlocks, horrible UI, and has no sense of direction. You can enable hints but it never gives you hints. You can find items but are unable to pick them up. So what exactly am I doing here?

Horror/Surrealist centered Curator: KuriKuration

I would give this game a neutral rating if I could.
It's very ambitious for a Unity game, and what is here is a fairly cool concept and an interesting story.
Unfortunately, it's also FULL of game breaking bugs, and is extremely unclear what to actually do to progress in the game, even with hints turned on. It feels more like an Alpha/Beta build of the game, and needs a ton more polish.
That said though, I would really like the developers to keep working on it; it has some real potential! Clear up the bugs, add some directional markers, and maybe let players save manually and in multiple spots so when the game does glitch up they aren't forced to restart completely.

This game has incredible potential.. I love the aesthetic and the story but god.. poorly executed, and incredibly buggy.. very unfortunate

I don't even know where to start. The intro to "Hatred" wasn't this edgy.
First, it DOES look nice, but I can't say I like the strange lines formed by the fog on the mountains around me every time I look up.
Second, I've never been so confused by a game's lack of direction so much in my life. No indications of where to go at all.
Third, almost no input for damage dealt to player or enemies.
Lastly, it's SO EDGY!
If on sale, then buy it. Otherwise, don't bother.

Vapour is a short first-person horror-themed action-adventure game made in Unity. You explore a small place "between Purgatory and Hell," solving a few puzzles, and fighting a few enemies with a few spells. The goal is to gather 3 pieces of an obelisk that, once assembled, acts as a key to the end of the game. Your journey is directed by objectives given to you in plain text, and sometimes hinted at by cheap jumpscares that appear without warning and WILL fuck your eardrums, which really sets the tone for the suffering ahead.

However, I have to admit a shameful affinity for the aesthetic, when it isn't trying to be obnoxious. The music can be good, and the tryhard voice acting excellently delivers pointless monologues that sound like they were written by Richard Marcinko.

When you're standing still, Vapour has SOME parts that look cool, by embracing all that 2edgy4u stuff, and creating a tiny world which adequately translates into its visuals into what I feel while playing. The way that the pseudo-medieval architecture blends with a hellscape of canyons and dark caves feels somewhat reminiscent of Doom. Your enemies are these amalgams of flesh that move unsettlingly quickly. Even the player's perspective has some thought put into it, with your health and ammo being displayed on your viewmodel, instead of cluttering the screen with a HUD, and the glow of your equipped weapon acts as a torch.

Then you hit the button that brings up the in-game help screen, which is supposed to display your controls and a hint to progress, delivered on a piece of paper that the player character holds up to his face, but you notice something is amiss; None of the controls actually display their corresponding buttons, instead opting for the unhelpful "press the jump button to jump" type instruction that comes from the game not properly reading the generic Unity bindings setup. From there, things just go downhill.

As I said earlier, SOME parts of the world CAN appear neat IF you're taking them at a passing glance. However, any coherence Vapour's visual style may have is thrown out the window from the moment you start to actually engage with it. The buildings' interiors feel barren and plain. Even in regards to the terrain itself, the rocks that form a great deal of surfaces for all of the walls and caves primarily exist to cover up stretched ground textures that show through half of the time, nonetheless.

Traversing this chaos is somehow a bigger nightmare. Small obstacles that seem negligible can interrupt your movement, and collision detection is all over the place, with some random invisible walls thrown in for good measure. Steep inclines can rapidly push you up into nonsensical jumps, or instantly drag you down to their lowest point, especially when you're swimming. There is some *light* platforming here as well, but it always feels like you're in danger of slipping off of even the slightest ledges, which is another exercise in patience, considering your jumps will usually (but not always) fail if your feet aren't definitely on a solid object.

Most enemies seem just as clueless as to how to address this geography, leading to some odd behavior; They seem to just cling to what geometry is underneath them, with no regard for water or drastic differences in elevation. Meaning, if you jump to a rooftop, the enemies will follow not by jumping, but by instantly sliding across the surfaces that you leaped over. It's pretty jarring to look at, even more so than the "Hell Lords," who simply follow you in a straight line, ignoring all physical barriers to attack you with screen shaking and earrape.

Your tools for fending off your opponents are a couple of projectile spells and your bare hands. The ranged attacks have weight and effect that definitely makes them feel useful and fun, but the melee combat lacks any impact, like beating someone with a dry pool noodle. Without structure or method, you just move within range of an enemy for which hand-to-hand combat is viable, aim in its general direction, and trade light taps with each other until one of you dies. What's depressing is that this is sometimes the most efficient option, if you don't have immediate access to ammo pickups.

The biggest problem, though, comes from how Vapour handles death. When it works the way it's supposed to, dying moves you back to checkpoints that can seem too far from where you expired, even back into dungeons that you've already left. However, it should come as no surprise that it doesn't always work, which is particularly confusing on a first blind playthrough. You might get sequence-skipped back to a location you've already explored, which can overwrite your objective hint, because the game gives you the hint for your next objective based location-specific triggers. Or, not knowing where to go, you might get skipped forward into a section that you don't know you aren't supposed to be in.

The first time I died, it sequence skipped me to the graveyard, where the gates were still locked, and then I found I could skip all over the place (with very little control) by dying in certain places. Of course, this isn't without consequence; I eventually realized that, no thanks to this glitch that I was practically tripping over, I didn't have a clue where to go or what to do. Ignore the playtime I've supposedly put in, because for every 15 minutes of actual gameplay, I spent an hour trying to figure out where to go next.

About three hours in, I discovered it was possible to climb some of the walls of the overworld via the "mountain humping" technique common to games that don't know how to handle their own sloped surfaces. This allowed me to reach a tunnel entrance from a side which I was not meant to reach it, leading to the last obelisk piece I was looking for. A few minutes after, I finished the game. The ending cutscene doesn't match the rest of the experience at all. You just drop into some sort of desert town? What?

It's never a good thing to accidentally glitch into the end of a game before you finish it legitimately. Feeling unsatisfied with that conclusion, I decided that I would play through again, the way that was intended. This is where more of my unnecessary time came from, as I'd only had this epiphany years after the fact, and I'd already forgotten much of the game before returning. This review has been too long in the making.

On the next attempt, I was making good time. At the end of the graveyard dungeon was a tunnel which sent me back to the church, where several enemies had spawned in. Before I knew it, I was pinned in a corner and killed.

The game then spawned me, not at where I had just entered the overworld, but at the start of the game. I was confused, and also noticed that my weapons weren't working. They seemed to have disappeared entirely. My gathered obelisk pieces? Gone. I had a guess at what was happening, and returned to where the player gets the melee attack. I go through the motions, and the voice acting for getting that first ability plays, and then the realization kicks in; The game had erased all my progress.

1 more try. I figured that, if I did get glitched back to square 1 again, I would give up.

My final playthrough was the culmination of my hours thrown away adapting to the game's broken mechanics. After encountering a beefier Hell Lord, requiring a lengthier battle that was more about managing pickups than about any real technique, and a bit more exploration, I finally completed the obelisk. I beat the game a 2nd time, this time, for realsies. It didn't really change my opinion.

While I can appreciate Vapour's concept, nearly all of its good ideas are buried beneath the rough implementation and game-breaking glitches which pervade the whole experience. They add only frustrating length to a game that can otherwise probably be beaten in an hour and a half. I have spent way more time on this than I should have.

An alpha build of a game where they charge 10 euro for...

A prime example of an Indie game that will never get finished. There is not much sense in playing this game because it is riddled with bugs and performance issues. Also there is a general lack of direction on what to do, there is no HUD, no map or minimap. Some hints pop up but then you still won't be able to get through this glorified demo of a game.

You can always watch the youtube playthrough I guess, as the devs themself suggested years ago when the product was still alive.

Only buy this if you're an aspiring game developer with a copy of Unity, some asset store art, and you want examples of things you should never, ever do with them.

Why, in my first and only five minutes of play I found examples of:

Menus that pop up on their own, give you no clue about how to turn them back off again, obscure most of the screen, and apparently don't do anything at all.
Puzzles so opaque you don't even know when you've encountered them.
Glitchy, stuttering swimming controls.
No feedback about what to do in any situation.

And so much more.

The prologue is boring. It should be removed in my opinion.

Once I was able to play I walked around a bit and did some exploring, but didn't really run into much. I did run into a power up of some kind and was able to pick it up, but when I ran into the next one I couldn't.

The environment is eerie, but nothing came from it. I'm not sure if my game was broken or glitched, but there is a lot missing I feel. Oh well.

I wasted 3 euros and thankfully they were only 3, not 10. Ever since the beginning, this game guides you with glitches which unfortunately decrease quality of the game. Let me give you a run down of some of them:

- Sometimes when you're in water, you can walk (even breathe), sometimes you have to swim. I found nice bug how to get through one place which was flooded with water just using this glitch.

- Monsters as they are introduced don't spawn regularly (Hell lord for instance). When you trigger the arm lever in the cave, sometimes he appears, sometimes he doesn't.

- When you die and you want to load the previous save, it will always spawn you in a different one. Sometimes I was spawned at the church, sometimes I got spawned on the spawn point.

- Hints (when you press tab) don't update with your progress. Sometimes you are left with very old hint from the early stages of the game so you either have to find solution on the internet or figure it out yourself.

And more glitches other probably found...

Really great game what it takes about effects, graphics, sounds and atmosphere but these unnecessary glitches just f-ed up...

A raw and uncomfortable experience. The game feels as though it was finished in a hurry, just to get the money flowing already. Fortunately, I bought this with a discount, so no real regrets, but I would definitely not pay $10 for such crap. To make myself clear, here are some details:

• The plot: it's like Hatred, another weird title where the "protagonist" is a manic killer with no particular reason to murder everyone in his path, only here you're a half-demon who's been "tortured and tormented" and is going to "make'em all pay". Banality at its finest.
  
• Enemies spring at you literally out of nowhere. You run along a path - WHOOSH! - and there's a fanged walking stick jumping you from behind, where there was nothing just a moment ago. Then you swim through a lake, turn a switch, and guess what? One more walking stick! Underwater! Okay, I get it, it's a horror FPS, but really?
  
• Cheap screamers all around the place. Guys, it should be a horror game, not a roadside show where papier-mache dolls boo you out of every corner. And in Vapour it's what we actually see. There is loud laughter and a harmless ghost appears somewhere near you, and that's it, the thing can't even do any damage or be damaged itself. It's just there for the spook.
  
• The arms animation is a total mess. When you get your weapon (if you can call your own hands that), the first thing you do is not go try them out on bad guys but shield your eyes from the jumping, over-bright flames that you can't hide and are forced to look at all the way. By the time I got used to the flashing, I think my eyesight dropped by at least three points. When you find your second weapon, it doesn't get better either - you had red-to-yellow light before, now you have blue-to-white one, and of the same retina-scorching quality. Not to say that the actual animation of hand movements makes you feel like you're playing as a guy with cerebral paralysis.
  
[*]And of course, the glitches. There are plenty, like getting stuck in a rock bed underwater and drowning to death. It's alright though, because it's a Unity Personal Edition game, and one can't blame the developer for not thinking such things through. Yet still, taken together with all I mentioned above, the overall experience is disastrous to say the least.

This game looks really neat, but unfortunately for me (and a lot of other people, from the looks of it), it is completely unplayable because of the controls. Not to do with key bindings or anything - the mouse, keyboard AND gamepad literally don't work. The most luck I had was with my Xbox controller; however, the x and y axises are completely out of alignment, and although they have an option to calibrate this in the menu, it does not seem to do anything. I'm sure the devs know about this issue, since it's been brought to their attention in the discussion forums quite a bit, but I've had this game for a while now and have checked back every now and then to see if they fixed it, only to be dissappointed. You may have better luck than myself, as a lot of other people seem to be having no issues at all with the controls. But you're pretty much rolling the dice as to whether or not it will work for you. It's not something you should have to worry about when purchasing a game, especially one that looks like it's had actual effort put into it. Hopefully this will be corrected down the line sometime, but I'm not very hopeful about it anymore. Buy at your own risk.

It's a gorefest and that's it.

The puzzles are too vague.
The fog and fire effects constantly in your face are horrid.
Jumpscares are cheap and random often not even facing the right way.
There's no directions in the game, just "do this"
"Ok where's this?"
"Hahaha find it yourself in this dark and foggy "map" good luck cunt"

1/10
Refunded

Open game, listen to intro. Not the worst story I've ever heard. Sure, it's a little corny, but it gives me a goal as a character and a bit of background. Around the end of the intro sequence I spin in the boat a few more times (it's about all you can do on the boat) and suddenly I find this weird visual glitch that throws my camera into an absolute chaos of spiraling.

I get out of the boat, load the next area, test out a few controls... and by zooming in with right click I not only start doing a barrel roll, but I lose control of my ability to turn my character. No longer able to continue on my epic quest, I close the game and delete it.

I changed my negative review into positive because devs were so kind and quickly added new Easy mode/difficulty into the game (see Patch 1.4 details). Now such pusssies like me can survive and defeat those badass Hell Lords! For me it was one major negative point of that great in whole game. So i recommend it now for wide audience of players, but not only for crazy hardcorers. Enjoy the Hell now!

A great concept but poor execution. Seems more like an early alpha or beta release than a finished game, very buggy, I had a cutscene bug out and send me back to my first save which was the very beginning of the game. Overall feels very unpolished and needs a good deal of work. I love the atmosphere and the idea as a whole but would only recommend this game if the devs get it smoothed out some till then I recommend you save your money for something else.

Played about an hour of this game. After 30 minutes of cheap jumpscares and over-the-top corny dialogue, my character became stuck on a rock and I had to reload.

Not recommended.

It's a mix of Blood and Hexen.

FEATURES:

-Spell-based combat -Meh, wish combat was better
-Interactive puzzles -decent
-Non-linear level design -old school, kinda buggy
-Plenty of exploration -yeah
-Tricky platforming -yeah
-Terrifying demons -will give you nightmares
-Deadly scares -will give you nightmares
-Sneaky secrets -still looking
-One gory and twisted plot -Dam right!

Update: Vapour has been a buggy mess and I almost gave up on it, but I didn't and the devs didn't. It was good to see an indie dev stick with their project. I'm sure their still smoothing out part 1 some more, but I'm looking forward to info on part 2.

This is one of the first and only games to scare me to the point of swearing out loud and having my roomate give me an awkward look. A little buggy and I'm stuck at the church yard . Found 2 caves that seem to have nothing in them yet . But I would recommend this game ! Options would be a great addition to the game , custom controls , being able to turn the game sound down a bit so I can hear Charles or what ever his name is swear a bit more . I found myself able to walk up some mountians to the point of clipping endlessly through the world so save your game alot if you are feeling like going on an adventure ! I think this is my first game review on steam so be gent!